Craft & Provenance
Twenty-two dips, and the point where blue stops
In a Xi'an courtyard, Yǒng feeds a vat rather than replacing it. Somewhere past the fifteenth dip, indigo becomes something else entirely.
Mei Halvorsen5 min read
A live indigo vat is closer to a sourdough starter than a bucket of dye. Yǒng's oldest has been fed continuously since the studio opened in 2018, and the head dyer talks about it the way people talk about a difficult but reliable relative.
Cloth goes in between nine and twenty-two times. Up to about fifteen dips the result reads as blue. Past that it turns into a very deep, faintly warm black that changes character depending on whether you are indoors.
“People ask us to match a piece they bought last year. We tell them the truth, which is that we cannot, and that this is the reason to buy it.”
Nothing is colour-matched between pieces, and every listing says so before you reach the size selector. It is the single most common question our customer team receives, and the one they most enjoy answering.
